The Invisible Assassin

The Invisible Assassin


Jim Eldridge



Chapter 1




The building site was much like any other, except for the small band of protestors standing outside the fence holding handmade placards that read ‘STOP IT’ and ‘SACRED PLACE’. Jake Wells, a trainee press officer (or ‘spin doctor’, as he preferred to think of it) for the Department of Science reflected that, as protests went, it was pretty feeble. Five people and a small unkempt dog. Hardly up there with a mass student demo in the centre of London. Still, it was a protest, and as they were protesting against the construction of a new university science block on what they claimed was the site of a fairy ring, it came under his remit.

A fairy ring, for heaven’s sake! He guessed that’s why he’d been given this particular job. This was a story that most of the others in the press office wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. But Jake wasn’t like the others. It seemed that everyone else in his department had come through the same route: public school, then university, mostly Oxford or Cambridge. When a national newspaper had pointed out how elitist this was, the department had acted to prove them wrong: a competition had been launched to offer an opportunity for a trainee press officer from what was called ‘the disadvantaged’. Jake had entered. He fitted the bill perfectly: abandoned at birth, brought up in an orphanage and then a string of foster homes, and he had left school at sixteen because he couldn’t afford to go on to further education. After he left school, he worked in a series of dead-end jobs. But always he had one burning ambition: to be a journalist. Every spare moment he had, he practised writing witty and biting articles about the issues of the day, exposing corrupt politicians. But getting into journalism wasn’t that easy: he discovered that he needed a degree.

It was while he had been wondering how to get over this problem that he’d read about the Department of Science competition, entered it, and won his place. At last, his big oppportunity! At eighteen years of age, he’d made it! Not quite the journalism he had dreamed of, but a proper job where he could hone his writing skills.

That had been nine months ago, and after nine months he was still a trainee press officer. The problem was, as Jake saw it, they didn’t know what to do with him. He wasn’t ‘one of them’; he didn’t have the same Oxbridge connections, or relatives inside other government departments, so they didn’t want to give him anything too ‘sensitive’. Something where he could upset important people. So, instead, he was given the soft stories, the quirky ones. Like this one: the threat to a fairy ring.

But if I do a really good job on this one, quell the protest and come out of it smelling of roses, maybe they’ll see I can actually do this job, Jake kept saying to himself, and next time I’ll get a proper assignment. Maybe something controversial, like climate change. That was always a sure-fire step up the promotion ladder.

As he looked at the scene before him, Jake noticed that there weren’t any TV cameras, or even local radio. Just a local journalist from the Bedfordshire Times who’d arranged to meet Jake at the site of the protest. Jake thought he saw her now: a woman in her mid-twenties talking to the protestors and jotting down notes on a pad.

Jake headed for the small group. Inside the fence, all was noise: heavy machinery, diggers tearing up the ground for the foundations for the new science block.

The young woman was talking to the elderly woman holding the placard saying ‘Sacred place’, and Jake heard her asking the woman her age, identifying her at once as a journalist. What was the local print media’s obsession with age? he thought. Every story had to have people’s ages in brackets. ‘Local businesswoman, Pauline Stone (37) . . .’ or ‘Mad serial killer, Victor Nutter (63) . . .’

‘Penny Johnson?’ he asked, and the young woman turned to face him, nodding. Jake smiled, his best press officer’s smile. ‘Jake Wells, Department of Science. We spoke on the phone.’

Before the young journalist could respond, the elderly woman brandished her placard at Jake angrily.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ she shouted. ‘This is a sacred place. Fairies have lived at this spot untroubled by humankind for thousands of years!’

‘And I’m sure they can continue to live here,’ said Jake, putting on what he hoped was a sincere expression. He struggled to remember the argument he’d been told to propose to the protestors by one of his senior colleagues. It had seemed pretty unbelievable, but it was the party line, and if he wanted to get on . . . ‘As I understand it, fairies are other-dimensional, and the study of other-dimensional states of existence will be one of the areas being looked at by the new science department . . .’